The First Transistor
A replica of the point-contact transistor built at Bell Labs in December 1947 by Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley.
The original was a slab of germanium, a plastic wedge and two strips of gold foil, and it amplified. Vacuum tubes were hot, fragile and large; this was none of those things. Within a decade transistors were in hearing aids and portable radios, within two they were being etched by the thousand onto silicon, and the industrial competition that followed became a matter for foreign ministries as much as for engineers. Read the full story in our article on Transistor Diplomacy: How Early Semiconductor Technology Shaped US-Japan Relations, 1955–1975.
Public domain — source (Wikimedia Commons). Free to reuse under the stated licence.
